Add item to Help menu

Question

What is the easiest way to add a item to the Help menu in Visual Studio 2008 that open's a URL in a new "tab"?

Answer 1

This is quite simple. First you will create a macro that does it and then you'll place it in Help menu.

1. Create the following macro:
   
      

   Code Snippet

       Sub OpenUrlInNewTab()
           Try
               Dim url As String
               url = "ms-help://MS.VSCC.v90/MS.MSDNQTR.v90.en/dv_vscmds/html/c6a4fbd6-8e9d-45cc-8b2f-93990d065e78.htm"
               'enclose URL in double quotes
               url = """" & url & """"
               DTE.ExecuteCommand("nav", url & " /new")
               'nav is alias for View.ShowWebBrowser command
               'Syntax:
               'View.ShowWebBrowser URL [/new][/ext]
               '
               '/new
               ' Optional. Specifies that the page appears in a new instance of the Web browser.
               '/ext
               ' Optional. Specifies that the page appears in the default Web browser outside of the IDE.
           Catch ex As Exception
           End Try
       End Sub

   
   Change the url variable to your desired value. Here is a quick help how to create macro in VS.
   
2. Place this macro to your Help menu. Here's the help how to do it.
   

Answer 2

Thanks! Great info!

 

Only thing I would like to know now is how can I package this into  VS.NET setup project so I can put the "macro" in a .MSI installer.

 

Answer 3

Ah, that's a different story. Macros cannot be deployed. If you want to do all this on other machines, you need to create add-in. This is more complicated. Just create Add-in project in VS. It will create simple add-in which adds its own menu under Tools menu. You need to modify  the code so that it creates menu under Help. Then you add the code from the macro to the menu handler.

See http://mztools.com/resources_vsnet_addins.aspx for great information about VS add-ins. Specially, see the following articles:
HOWTO: Adding buttons, commandbars and toolbars to Visual Studio .NET from an add-in

HOWTO: Guessing the name of a command bar to add a custom menu entry in Visual Studio .NET add-ins

HOWTO: Removing commands and UI elements during Visual Studio .NET add-in uninstallation